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Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Holiday Halloween

Ok, so I'm not a huge fan of Halloween. Why celebrate something that revolves around evil? We rejoice in goodness and light. However, I'm not going to be totally bah humbug, so we dress up and go trick or treating because really it's all about the free candy. Right?

So, if we are going to do Halloween, I require my kids to dress in a theme because my I have a theory that themed costumes receive more candy. There are lots of themed ideas, but the difficult part is getting them all to agree who is going to be what. For example, the Wizard of Oz would be a perfect theme, but nobody wants to be the wicked witch and all the girls want to be the Glenda, and it always ends up in arguing. This year I threw a few ideas on the table and finally one morning they came downstairs to breakfast and announced that they agreed to be holidays. Surprisingly there was not much arguing over who was going to be what holiday because the holidays are not very gender specific. I can honestly say that this year's costumes were VERY low budget. Now, of course I'm a tiny bit of a saver and suffer a mild case of pack-ratness which comes in very handy during times like this when some creativity and improvisation is essential.

Here they are:

Thanksgiving

We had the black tights, brown shorts and brown shirt. We cut feathers from 2 white poster boards ($0.69 each) and spray painted them with paint I already had. I also bought the foam for the turkey feet ($0.99). We stuck some feathers in her hair that I bought 10 years ago for a Thanksgiving project when Emily was 19 months old. The feathers are attached to Emily with a belt and some yarn around the arms. Total cost $2.47.

Fourth of July

Bradley is wearing a pair of my red capri pants to which I applied masking tape stripes (he is wearing a belt. My waist is not the same size an 8 year old boy's), a blue suit coat, a red sash from one of the girl's dresses for his tie, a vest from his magician's costume, and my husband's red striped socks. The hat is also from his magician's costume that he got for Christmas last year from my dad and sister. We put on red and white construction paper stripes, a blue velvet fabric scrap, and a white felt star. And of course cotton ball beard and eyebrows attached with double sticky tape. Bradley's costume cost $0.

Valentine's Day

Sarah is wearing her pretty pink princess dress that my mother-in-law made last year. I attached some red felt hearts and paper Valentines. She is wearing heart ornaments around her ears and we made her a red glitter heart head headband. She is also wearing pink fairy wings that I had stashed in a closet. Sarah's costume cost $0.

Easter

For Wendy I cut out the bottom of a basket that has been sitting in our garage for the past seven years. It hung on her with grosgrain ribbon that I had in my ribbon stash. I made her some bunny ears from stiff felt ($0.99). I attached our plastic Easter eggs to a large wad of plastic Walmart grocery bags. The basket is essential to the costume or else the costume has a totally different look. Total cost $0.99.

St. Patrick's Day

This one required a little sewing. I made Jason a very rough pair of drawstring pants and a vest, because everyone has a yard or two of green gingham in their fabric stash, right? (No awards for the sewing. There were no hems or pretty stitches.) The green sequin bow is from some St. Patrick's Day goodies my mother-in-law sent a year or two ago. The hat is from our German family reunion in 2008 and I added a green shamrock to the side. Also the green boots are something that have been kicking around the house for awhile because I had to get them when they were clearanced for $2 at Walmart. Total cost $0.

Christmas

Ok, so Rachel wasn't the most cooperative when it came to her costume. I had a great idea to transform Rachel into a Christmas tree. I had the perfect dress I was going to dye green and decorate like a tree. But she refused. I probably could've gone forward with my plan, but I really didn't want to put forth the effort of Rit dye if she was going to be a pain about it. So since she had a red dress, that my mother-in-law also made last year, we improvised and she was transformed into Holiday Barbie. I added holly leaves and berries to her beauty pageant sash to help make things a little clearer that she was Christmas. I'm still disappointed I didn't get to dress her as a Christmas tree. But you can't reason much with three year old little girls because all they want to be are princesses, and I couldn't convince Bradley to wear a dress.

Halloween

I had an orange t-shirt about 2 or 3 sizes too big for George. I put it on him and wrapped a rubber band around his waist and the bottom of the t-shirt. I tacked on some black foam (that I already had) jack-o-lantern facial pieces that I cut and....Wallah!...a pumpkin. I would've taken it a step further and made him some leaves for his head, but George doesn't like things on his head, so I didn't bother. We stuffed his shirt with some of those big packing bubbles, like the really big ones that come in a perferated strip. You know what I mean? Anyway, we were lucky because we had just received about three packages from Amazon packed with them and they worked out really well, and he didn't mind being all puffed up all evening. Total cost $0.

Happy Holidays!

Oh and here is Emily's beak that we forgot to have her wear in the other picture. It's made from a birthday hat and orange paint with a red feather attached.

Ok, so we might have added a little bit of evil to the evening. But it only lasted 2 seconds for the photo.

Halloween was a success. $3.46 for seven costumes and 17 pounds 10 ounces of free candy later, we are finished for another year. Moving on to Emily....I mean Thanksgiving.....

3 comments:

I love this! The theme, the costumes, the creativity involved -- the masking tape to make stripes on Bradley's trousers is brilliant.

Apparently in the UK there is a big divide between who does and doesn't celebrate Halloween. All of my evangelical Christian friend REALLY disapprove of it. I've done plenty of research into Samhain and have no qualms with celebrating Halloween because to be honest, what it looks like today is NOTHING like the pagan rituals it used to be. Instead, I like Halloween because it's such a community event, and dressing up is fun, plus there's free candy. As for dressing up as scary things, why not learn from an early age that these things are scary after all? Especially when we have the Creator of the Universe on our side.

I'll step off my soap box now. :) My costume this year was also mostly made up of things that I already had. I bought a shawl from a charity shop for £3 and some fish beads from the craft shop for also £3 (I felt a little ripped off for these. I was going to cut fish out of paper but ran out of time). But otherwise, I had everything set to be a sea nymph.